There are lots of types of information I want to search and
browser, but it's typically information that I want to see right
now. I also want to be notified about new information and changes
to information. Emails, text messages, and pager alerts are ways
to send this information to me. Feeds are a little different in
that they're controlled by the receiver pulling information
rather than the sender pushing it. All of these systems allow
senders to transmit messages to receivers. However all of them
treat each message separately.

What I really want is information, not a set of messages. The
messages should be grouped and summarized. Gmail for example
groups messages into conversations. Facebook groups and
summarizes friend updates. For example instead of separately
telling me, “A is a friend of D”, “B is a friend of D”, and “C is
a friend of D”, Facebook will tell me “A, B, and C are friends of
D”. They can do this because they know the structure, not only
text, of messages, and also because they know when I last read
messages.

There are lots more things I'd like to see along these lines. For
example if I receive 100 messages telling me my site is down, and
I'm away from my computer, I'd like them to be combined
together. Or if the site is back up maybe those messages should
go away, replaced by a note saying the site went down and back
up. If I get a traffic alert it should expire when the traffic
clears up again. If I read news every hour I want to see what's
new in the past hour but if I read news once a week I want to see
the week's biggest stories, not the 168 hours of updates. When I
come back from vacation I shouldn't have lots of low-importance
and redundant messages. Group and summarize. Show me what's
important. Don't overwhelm me with every individual message.